After lengthy testing, it has finally arrived. The all-in-one TiVo upgrade 
disk.

What is it? What does it do?

I'm not good at hacking, so the CD is merely a repackaging of existing tools. 
I just thought it'd be nice to use just one CD instead of numerous floppies 
(plus, CDRs go bad far more seldom than floppy disks).

For starters, treat it like you would DBD. It's a mini-Linux installation that 
has a few extras for upgrading a TiVo:

BlessTiVo - for preparing a second disk
TiVoMad tools, for expanding your A drive and/or adding a second one.
TiVonet setup script, for those who want to add ethernet to their equipment.

A number of other tools. Notably:

-dd is bonehead's hacked version; if you add 'progress=1' to the command line, 
     it will show how many blocks it has copied so far. This slows down the    
     copying by about 10%.

-text editors: joe (the same as in DBD), pico and vi.

-mc: *DON'T USE IT AS OF NOW*. It's there, but broken. I'll fix it in a future 
     release, but I really don't have the time to do it now. Don't write me to 
     say it's broken (unless you have a fix), I know about the problem. If     
     you do, you'll be sent to RTFM.

-plus some nice Unix tools. Dig around to find them, it'll be more fun this    
    way. :)

The kernels the CD boots from (one with IDE DMA support, one without DMA) have 
been both patched with the TiVo partition patch and fray's unlocking patch - 
locked A drives should be transparently unlocked at boot. If unlocking fails 
(as it has been reported to happen sometimes) just reboot and the second time 
it should work.


Usage
-----

Get the CD image (.iso). For now, it's a 6.4M download, which, for whoever is 
stuck with a dialup (like me) translates to a ~25min d/l. Burn it to CDR as an 
image - do not burn as a file! Here are some directions.

In Linux: use cdrecord dev=x,y,z tbd2_5d.iso speed=(whatever your drive can 
take). You can get the x,y,z part by running 'cdrecord -scanbus'

In Windows: 
-if you use Nero (of which you can get an evaluation copy at                   
     http://www.ahead.de), go to the "file" menu, select "burn image...", then 
     choose the .iso image. The file selection dialog defaults to .nrg type    
     images, but you can select the .iso  by changing to "file type: all *.*".

-if you use Adaptec's Easy CD Creator, here are instructions, verbatim from    
    Dan Thomson:

1.  Start Easy CD Creator, tell it you want to make a Data CD.  Skip
    or cancel any wizard if you've got it set to do that.  Just get
    into the real application.
2.  Go to the "File" menu, choose "Create CD from CD Image..."
3.  Change the file type to "ISO Image Files (*.iso)" and browse to
    the directory and file you want to burn.  Open the file.
4.  This should jump straight into the "CD Creation Setup" dialog box.
    I've successfully used Disc-at-Once and Track-at-Once (with just
    closing the session or closing the whole disc, doesn't matter)
    And both CDR's and CD-RWs.
5.  Click OK and let it burn.  Takes about 2 minutes at 4x speed if
    you close the CD, less if you don't.

No matter what method you choose, you should end-up with a bootable CD. Open 
it with your favorite file manager (yes, it's readable under Windows too), and 
you should see a bunch of readmes in the root of the CD and a directory 
'isolinux' with stuff necessary for the boot.

Go to your PC's BIOS and set the boot options to 'boot from CD'. The exact way 
to do it varies from PC to PC, so I'll not even try to give indications. If 
you're not comfortable doing this, you shouldn't be upgrading a TiVo by 
yourself.

Make sure you know what you want to do, and read blesstivo.txt, tivomad.txt 
and tivonet.txt, included on the CD.

Boot from the CD. Select the right boot option using the info on the screen. 
Hint: if all you want is do a fast backup, at the boot prompt type 'noswap' 
(without the quotes). If you want to be able to mount and modify the A drive 
partitions, use the default boot, i.e. just press enter. You'll end-up at a 
'login' prompt. Log as 'root', and from that point, you're on your own. You 
_have_ read the readmes, faqs and howtos, right? :) BlessTiVo is in /bin; the 
TiVoMad utilities are in /mad; the TiVoNet script+packages are in /tivonet. 
BTW, all of these are in the path. Just a mention on the TiVoNet script: I've 
slightly altered one line, to make it agree with the place where it's found on 
the CD (as opposed to where it would be when mounting a floppy). To edit it, 
you can choose between joe, vi (real vi, not a symlink to joe) and pico.

I'd love to hear from you - if you like it or not, what would you like to see 
in a future release, etc. I know - binaries to run on the TiVo. This would 
have made the download a whopping 9M+. I'll probably add a few extras in a 
second release sometime soon. For this first version, I've tried to keep it 
lean, an easy download for everybody. The version number of the .iso is in 
direct continuance of the beta series, and I'd like to keep it this way to 
avoid ambiguities when referring to the CD version. This release is v2.5d.

I have made efforts to make sure, for every piece of software on this CD, that 
I had the right to include it. Should you know of any problem with any 
featured code, please contact me. Since most of this software is under the 
General Public License, I've included a copy of the GPL. The source code 
hasn't been altered by me in any way, and should be available in its original 
form from the copyright holder.

For any communications, please send me a private message on the AVS forum.

Enjoy!

Silviu Tamasdan (aka kazymyr)